Surgeon, Orlando Orthopedic Center

Jeffrey Rosen will tell you that one of the most formidable challenges of his life has been to strike a balance between the demands of his career as an orthopedic surgeon, and the demands of his family. Now, at age 58, the father of four grown children can say with confidence that his biggest challenge also is his biggest success.

“I’ve witnessed many professionals, both in and out of medicine, become consumed and driven by their profession at the expense of family neglect, resulting in divorce, children’s behavioral issues, and worse,” said Rosen, whose practice just marked 26 years at the 17-physician Orlando Orthopedic Center.

Rosen’s oldest son is 27 now, but when he was just 4 years old he provided his dad some lasting perspective. “My son was in pre-school, and during a circle-time discussion the children were asked ‘What does your dad do?’” Rosen remembered. “He told them I was a bone doctor, and then the teacher asked if he wanted to be a bone doctor, too. My son said ‘No way!’ The teacher asked why and my son said ‘You have to get up early in the morning. You have to work really hard. And you’re pissed-off all the time,’” Rosen said.

“That really hit home,” and since then, Rosen said his attitude has been “family first. ...   If you don’t operate on every hip, or knee, or have the busiest practice in town, does it really matter when your kids are grown up? ... Going to the T-ball games and soccer games and birthday parties is incredibly important,” Rosen said, and that is a truism of which he frequently reminds his younger colleagues.

“My children are like a poker hand,” Rosen said. “They’re similar, but all different. My wife and I know they are happy and we’ve allowed them to follow their dreams.”

Rosen, who is the oldest of three children, said his parents did the same for him as he grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, both in terms of his academic pursuits and instilling the importance of family. His late mother was a director at the National Institutes of Mental Health at a time when women rarely reached such status. His father, who is still vibrant at 96, screened grant requests for private research facilities, also at the NIH. “My parents placed a great deal of emphasis on the need for a solid education as the basis of success later in life,” Rosen said.

When he enrolled at the University Of Maryland in 1970, Rosen had no inkling that he would wind up studying medicine. “I began my college career studying music, as a violin performance major.  ...  I was pretty accomplished and very dedicated to that career path,” he said. “I played first violin in the university orchestra, and on one occasion played at the Kennedy Center with the Washington National Symphony.”

But Rosen also came to understand that the odds were high. “Classical music at the professional level is extremely competitive,” he said.

“On a whim, I took a human anatomy course and it just clicked. That was it! I had to backpedal a bit to come up to speed on my science courses,” Rosen said, and he earned his undergraduate degree in biology. He then obtained his MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and completed his internship in internal medicine and residency in orthopedic surgery at Emory University in Atlanta, which is where he met his wife Lisa.

“I met her in the emergency room at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta” while working on a traumatically injured patient, Rosen said. She was a registered nursing student and, as it turned out, from Winter Park, Fla. “We got married a couple of years later” and, after a one-year stint at a private practice in Virginia, they moved to Maitland and he joined the practice that soon would become Orlando Orthopedic Center.

At Orlando Orthopedic, Rosen spends about one-third of his time in surgery at Orlando Health, and the remainder evenly divided between the practice’s offices downtown, Lake Mary and Winter Park. “I’m really focused on refining the hip and knee,” he said.

“In conjunction with the administration at Orlando Health, we are working on developing an innovative, state-of-the-art Total Joint Replacement Center.  This will involve multiple disciplines, including anesthesia, surgical staff, multi-modal pain management, physical therapy, nursing, and discharge planning,” Rosen explained. “Once all the goals are met, we feel this will be the premier Total Joint Replacement program in the southeast,” he said.

For instance, “a procedure that used to keep a patient in the hospital for a week now has them out in two days. ... We get them up and moving more quickly and get them off the narcotics sooner ,” Rosen said. “It’s a huge improvement in patient satisfaction and recovery.”

Rosen shares his experience at the residency training program at Orlando Health, and residents routinely rotate through the Orlando Orthopedic Center for a month at a time, he said. In 2012, Rosen said he plans to teach first-year-students about orthopedic anatomy at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine.

In that capacity, he might be likely to pass along what he describes as some of the best professional advice he’s ever received. “Tom Whitesides, former chief and professor of Orthopedics at Emory University, used to tell his students and residents: “At the end of the day, when you look in the mirror, make sure that the person you see is someone that your mother would be proud of, or at least not ashamed of. Don’t do anything that would make her question your values, honesty or integrity.”

Whitesides’ words would appear to be another pillar in Rosen’s “family-first” philosophy.

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